FILE - In this July 23, 2012 file photo, James E. Holmes appears in Arapahoe County District Court in Centennial, Colo. Nearly six months after a bloody rampage in a Colorado movie theater left 12 people dead, prosecutors will go to court Monday Jan. 7, 2013 to outline their case against the suspect, James Holmes. (AP Photo/Denver Post, RJ Sangosti, Pool, File)

A trail of blood ran from the sidewalk to where he stood. A trail of people poured from the door toward him, their screams for help ringing his ears. And behind him, in a patrol car, sat the man accused of causing the chaos.

Moments earlier, when Grizzle, an Aurora police officer, asked a handcuffed James Holmes whether there was anyone else with him, Holmes smiled.

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“Like a smirk,” Grizzle testified Monday at the first day of the preliminary hearing in the murder case against Holmes.

Grizzle knew he needed to go inside the theater. And so, summoning his courage and pulling his gun, he stepped over the semiautomatic rifle the shooter left lying beside the door and walked into the theater.

“I slipped,” he said. “I almost fell down because of all the blood there.”

Inside, tear gas singed his eyes and throat. An alarm blared. A strobe light flashed. The movie — “The Dark Knight Rises”, the latest Batman film — continued to roll.

Grizzle could see bodies lying motionless. Another officer who testified Monday, Sgt. Gerald Jonsgaard, recalled seeing frightened patrons cowering in the first two rows of the theater.

Communicating through shouts over the noise inside, the officers in the theater quickly developed a system for helping victims.

Get them out of the theater. If they could talk, send them a few yards away from the theater exit to await treatment. If they couldn’t, lay them by the door and get them help immediately.

For Grizzle and others, that meant using their patrol cars.

“After what I saw in the theater,” he said Monday. “After the horrific...”

In the courtroom, Grizzle’s voice choked.

“I didn’t want anyone else to die.”

On his first trip to the hospital that night, Grizzle took two people. In his back seat was Ashley Moser, bleeding from gunshot wounds to the head. In his passenger seat was her husband.

“He kept asking me where his 7-year-old daughter was,” Grizzle said. “Repeatedly. He wanted to turn around to find his 7-year-old daughter.”

Back inside the theater, an officer approached Jonsgaard, carrying the body of 7-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan.

Jonsgaard felt the little girl’s next, hoping for a pulse. There was none.

But, in Grizzle’s car, the man was insistent. He was going back to the theater. At one point, Grizzle said Monday, the man opened the passenger door and tried to leap from the car. Grizzle — speeding along with lights and sirens — had to wrestle him back into the car. The drive to Medical Center of Aurora South took only a few minutes, Grizzle said, but he spent half of it fighting to keep one patient in the car.

Once at the hospital, Grizzle gave his victims to waiting staffers. Then he turned around.

On his next trip to the hospital, Grizzle carried two more victims in his patrol car. On the third, it was a man with a gunshot wound to his head.

The man, Caleb Medley, was breathing, but just barely, Grizzle said.

“It was the most God awful sound,” Grizzle testified.

It was when the sound faded, though, that Grizzle could sense the life slipping from the man in his back seat and, from his driver’s seat, Grizzle felt the need to do more.

“Don’t you ... die on me!” Grizzle said he would yell back at Medley when he could no longer hear him breathing. “Don’t you ... die on me!”

When he was done yelling, Grizzle said, the terrible noise, gratefully, would return.

Grizzle took Medley to the University of Colorado hospital, where doctors saved his life. Grizzle didn’t stop to find that out, though. He went back to the theater, where one more victim — so covered in blood Grizzle couldn’t tell whether the person was young or old, man or woman — awaited.

By the end of the night, pools of blood gathered on his floorboards and seat cushions. There was blood on his car’s ceiling, on its dashboard, on its headrests.

“There was so much blood,” Grizzle testified Monday, “I could hear it sloshing in the back of my car.”

John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/john_ingold